History

The letter K comes from the Greek letter Κ (kappa), which was taken from the Semitickap, the symbol for an open hand.[2] This, in turn, was likely adapted by Semites who had lived in Egypt from the hieroglyph for "hand" representing D in the Egyptian word for hand, d-r-t. The Semites evidently assigned it the sound value /k/ instead, because their word for hand started with that sound.[3]

In the earliest Latin inscriptions, the letters C, K and Q were all used to represent the sounds /k/ and /g/ (which were not differentiated in writing). Of these, Q was used to represent /k/ or /g/ before a rounded vowel, K before /a/, and C elsewhere. Later, the use of C and its variant G replaced most usages of K and Q. K survived only in a few fossilized forms such as Kalendae, "the calends".[4]

After Greek words were taken into Latin, the Kappa was transliterated as a C. Loanwords from other alphabets with the sound /k/ were also transliterated with C. Hence, the Romance languages generally use C and have K only in later loanwords from other language groups. The Celtic languages also tended to use C instead of K, and this influence carried over into Old English.

Use in writing systems

English

Today, English is the only Germanic language to productively use "hard" ⟨c⟩ (outside the digraph ⟨ck⟩) rather than ⟨k⟩ (although Dutch uses it in loaned words of Latin origin, and the pronunciation of these words follows the same hard/soft distinction as in English).[citation needed] The letter ⟨k⟩ is usually silent at the start of an English word when it comes before the letter ⟨n⟩, as in the words "knight," "knife," "knot," "know," and "knee". Like J, X, Q, and Z, K is not used very frequently in English. It is the fifth least frequently used letter in the English language, with a frequency of about 0.8% in words.

Number

The SI prefix for a thousand is kilo-, officially abbreviated as k—for instance, prefixed to "metre" or its abbreviation m, kilometre or km signifies a thousand metres. As such, people occasionally represent numbers in a non-standard notation by replacing the last three zeros of the general numeral with "K": for instance, 30K for 30,000.

Other languages

In most languages where it is employed, this letter represents the sound /k/ (with or without aspiration) or some similar sound.

ₖ : Subscript small k was used in the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet prior to its formal standardization in 1902[6]

Ʞ ʞ : Turned capital and small k were used in transcriptions of the Dakota language in publications of the American Board of Ethnology in the late 19th century.[7] Turned small k was also used for a velar click in the International Phonetic Alphabet but its use was withdrawn in 1970.